But neither side was winning, and the corporations were losing money hand over fist – both from Anarchista attacks and the simple expense of keeping the war going. De Sejos wasn’t quite sure what had snapped, precisely. Perhaps it was just that the men behind the fighting had lost patience. Perhaps the idealism of the Anarchistas had decayed into the sort of backbiting rabies that such popular movements so often devolved to, not fighting for, just fighting against. Perhaps it was just that business interests thought, We can monetise this.
They had brought in the Bioforms – ostensibly because they were cheaper and more effective than regular soldiers. Cheaper? Yes, quicker to train, no grieving relatives when they died, and you could breed them en masse in battery farms – she had seen the videos. Looking out at the bizarre set of animal soldiers that Retorna had inherited, de Sejos knew that they were doing more than deploying soldiers. They were testing them.
And it wasn’t just Bioforms they were testing. Campeche and the Yucatan presented difficult terrain for rooting out a widespread popular revolution. The counter-insurgency had been experimenting with other alternatives to just sending men into the trees.
A plane had gone over, south of the village. Probably it had been lost, or the crew had been over-eager, but in its wake had come an invisible death, a chemical fug that stank of rot. The cattle over that way had died and had to be burned. Many people had died, too, and the survivors had come out with terrible burns across their skin, and blindness, and madness.
The world outside was just now starting to catch up with the mess that Campeche had become. There were persistent rumours about illegal weapons testing, about what the Bioforms were doing to combatants and civilians both. There were denials as well, of course, and in general the voices of the corporate lawyers and spokesmen were a lot louder than those raising the accusations. And yet the accusations would not go away. There was word of a multinational inquest, UN action, pressure on the US government from its electorate to send some observers over the border.
And Doctor de Sejos tended the evidence of what had been done, and did her best to make them comfortable and keep them alive, while the poison ate them alive from within.
Two weeks later another cavalcade arrived at Retorna. This lot styled themselves as patriots and claimed they were hunting Anarchistas. Their uniforms were ragged and dirty and their guns were much in evidence. They wanted food, and they wanted to take what little medicine de Sejos had left. They wanted everyone in the village to assemble out in the open, where they could see them.
“We can give you food,” de Sejos told them flatly. Blanco had long since stopped complaining about the depletion of the herd he had been left to watch over. The owner was off safe, out of the country. Let him complain when he deigned to come back. “What drugs we have, we need.”
Their leader was a thin-faced man who had his thugs drag her over to his car and force her head onto the dashboard while he toyed with his pistol.
“Make this easy for us,” he said. “My men are in a bad mood, they will get angry if they’re kept waiting. You don’t want that.”
“For your own sake please leave,” de Sejos grated out.
Something in her tone had got to him – she could see the sudden uncertainty in the way his hands froze on the weapon. He was surrounded by his men, though, and insecure enough that he could not back down.
“I’m warning you—” he said, and then Rex came out, stalking on all fours and growling loud enough that she felt it through the ground.
“Mother of God.” The leader of the patriots dropped his gun. His two henchmen had let de Sejos go immediately and levelled their rifles.
Rex barked thunderously, the sound coming in at a pitch that spoke fear right into the human nervous system. His shoulder-mounted guns swivelled from target to target. He bared his teeth, snarling, strings of saliva dripping down his chin.
“Please, go,” de Sejos told them.
She felt their courage falter but hold. They were telling themselves there was just the one dog, no matter how big, no matter how well armed.
Then Honey slouched out into sight as well, gun levelled, and that decided matters. The intruders left; they left and they lived.
That had been the deal, worked out between the human leadership of Retorna, on the one part, and the Bioforms on the other. Give them a chance to go. Rex had been hard to convince, which she had expected. Honey had been harder, which she hadn’t. In the end, de Sejos guessed that Honey didn’t like the idea of witnesses. Word would spread.
But de Sejos had argued and argued, not angrily but patiently. And when Honey had proven immovable, she had argued with Rex, or at Rex. She had gone out to find him lying in the sun with his head on his paws, his back rising past her waist, and she had talked to him. This is not how we do things. Killing should be a last resort.
Until now – until the new attackers had arrived – she had not known how the Bioforms would handle it.
But they stood and watched, as the intruders drove away post-haste. Even Dragon watched from its sniper’s post atop the church, and aimed its gun but did not fire.
Honey shook herself, slung her gun and raised her clawed hand in a mockery of threat. “Grrr, snarl,” she said in her cultured voice and wandered off. De Sejos guessed she still thought the idea a bad one.
Rex rose up on two legs, watching the retreating vehicles keenly. De Sejos knew that some of the bees (some of the Bees?) would be following to keep an eye on them, to ensure there was no surprise attack later. She wondered if Rex was having to control some doggy instinct to go chasing cars for the sheer fun of it.
Passing him, stepping through his shadow and close to the great dense mass of him, she had an impulse, utterly wrong, utterly misguided. She reached out and touched his arm, feeling the thick, corded muscle rock hard beneath a hide tougher than leather,.
“Good boy,” she told him. “Thank you, Rex. Good boy.”
His head cocked, one ear up, just like a real dog. But he wasn’t a real dog, and she was making a mistake, thinking of him in that way. He was a monster made by men.
Still, it was easy to anthropomorphise him, to see the curve of his tooth-studded jaw as a smile, to see a yearning for acceptance in those brown animal eyes. It was easy to – what, caninomorphise? – him as well. He wasn’t anyone’s ‘good boy’.
And yet she patted him on the arm and said it again, because it helped her get past her fear of him, and because she had always lived in a house with dogs, since she was very small.
Four days later, a flitter passed overhead.
18
Rex
Dragon and Honey are talking about something on a private channel. Probably I am not supposed to know, but I can tell from the way they keep looking at each other.
There was a flitter. The humans were very scared of it, but they seem to be scared of everything. Honey said that bad things happened here when air vehicles flew over the village before. Honey says the bad-smelling people who are dying here, they are dying because of those bad things.
Honey does not think this flitter is bringing the same bad things, but I can see she things it brings some kind of bad things.
Dragon has the best eyes. He can see colours properly – better than humans. He can focus at a great distance: it’s part of his specifications, so he can perform his combat role. Dragon got a better look at the flitter than anyone else.
Dragon did not report to me. He reported to Honey. That was wrong of him. I am leader.
Honey’s channel: Yes, you are our leader, Rex. But Dragon knows this is something that falls into my area of expertise.
I tell Honey, Your specialisation is heavy weapons support. Was it a heavy weapons flitter? It looked like a small scout model.
Honey’s channel: Yes, it was a scout. But I am improving on my original specifications, Rex. I am becoming something more.
I whine at that, because this sounds unfamiliar and maybe dangerous. That is not part of our
orders.
Honey’s channel: We have no orders, and nobody ever ordered me not to do it.
I do not feel this is the way we are supposed to approach our combat role in this theatre. We do what we are told.
Honey’s channel: You are leader. Are you ordering me not to improve myself?
I know that I could say yes. It would make me feel better: I would be asserting my leadership. It would make Honey feel worse. This is something that she wants and it does not seem to impair our combat effectiveness. I do not give any orders. I do not want to upset Honey. I just say, I do not understand what you mean by improving.
Honey’s channel: I am an experimental Bioform intended for heavy weapons support, as you say. However, I have reason to believe I have been inadvertently over-engineered.
I do not understand her.
Honey’s channel: I have been using comms channels for some time to gain a greater understanding of the wider political situation, especially as it pertains to the war in Campeche and the use of Bioforms, both of which are highly controversial topics at a global level.
My channel: You got a new voice.
Honey’s channel: I downloaded one, yes. That is a part of it.
My channel: Did Master order you to?
Honey’s channel: He didn’t order me not to. And then, because she senses I am not won over by this, she adds, Maybe Hart knew.
I feel sad about Hart, then. Hart was not Master, but he was kind and I have good memories of him. And those good memories are now sad memories because all of them are tagged with my knowledge of his death. I try to remove these tags so I can enjoy the memories, but something goes wrong and I can’t.
My channel: What did Dragon say about the flitter?
Honey shuffles and shifts, and I know she is thinking of how to reply. Honey is very clever, so when it takes her this long, I know it is for an important reason.
Honey’s channel (at last): Rex, I will tell you if you order me. But I am asking you not to order me.
I do not understand her.
Honey’s channel: In my judgement this is something you are better off not knowing at this time.
My channel: If I do not have proper intelligence I cannot make command decisions.
Honey’s channel: In this case, Rex, I don’t think you could make an objective decision either way.
My channel: So, trust you?
Honey’s channel: Please trust me, Rex.
I think – or rather I let the pieces of the inside of my head run around for a bit, and try to get an idea of what I think. Sometimes it is hard.
My channel: If I trust you, will Doctor Thea de Sejos be hurt?
Honey is surprised. Not as a result of you trusting me. I cannot guarantee she or any of the humans here won’t be hurt, but I am trying to avoid it.
I trust Honey. I have no Master and only a limited ability to make informed decisions. I am a long way outside the situations I was designed to handle. If I do not trust Honey, I have nothing.
The next day I start hearing ghosts on the comms. Ghosts is what Honey calls them: fragments of signal on familiar frequencies, saying nothing, promising everything. The others hear them too. Bees reports them as soon as she detects them, and starts working on triangulating their origin.
Bees’ channel: Integrity at 63% Projected integrity within seven days: 42% Advance warning of loss of higher functions. Bees’ units are dying, eldest first. Bees’ specifications include a complete unit replacement every one hundred days and she was overdue before we lost contact with Master. Bees units are dying, so where is Bees? Bees exists between them, formed by the interaction of her many bodies and their computational power. I have a picture of Bees in my mind: someone in a smaller and smaller room, the walls closing in, and when they touch the walls they lose part of themselves.
Honey tells Bees she has a plan. Bees does not seem to believe her.
Bees is trying to calculate at what level of integrity she will cease to be Bees and just become… bees. I try to see a picture of this in my head and I cannot. Where will Bees go when there aren’t enough bees?
Dragon’s channel: We are all the same. Where will any of us go?
I ask Dragon: What do you want?
Dragon’s channel: Food. Warm sun. No orders. Kill humans, Bang!
My channel: This is what you want?
Dragon’s channel: No. These are good things. These are things they made me to feel as good. They did not make me to want.
My channel: Don’t you want to be Good Dragon?
Dragon’s channel: I want freedom from their good and bad.
Honey is distracted. Honey spends all her time with the satellite link, shifting from connection to connection, talking to people. Now the comms ghosts are here, I think Honey is using them to send out her signals too. Honey is busy. Honey has no time to talk.
Doctor Thea de Sejos comes to me. She asks, “What is it, Rex? What’s coming?”
I tell her I don’t know – I say it in Spanish now. Of all phrases, that is one I have the most use for. That flinch in her is still there when she hears my voice, but her fear spikes and then fades, rather than poisoning the air between us. I know so much about her just from her smell: her age, her gender, that she is tired, that she is anxious, that she is not eating well.
“Honey knows, doesn’t she?” the doctor presses.
I nod, because that doesn’t scare her as much. She goes to talk to Honey, but Honey has few words for her. I feel like Honey is fighting an invisible battle where I cannot help her.
The ghosts grow stronger. Dragon reports that he sees activity within the trees, beyond the fences. Bees sends units to investigate. There are gunmen there. Bees’ report is fragmentary. They are all keeping something from me, that it is better I do not know.
I am not stupid. I have had an idea about it. When I first thought it, I wanted to run about the village telling everyone the good news. Except that, for Honey and Dragon, at least, whatever is happening is not good news. Even for Bees it does not seem to be good news. Although as Bees deteriorates it becomes harder and harder to find personality and emotional tags in her communications. She is becoming a thing of data only.
I crouch in the village centre and whine. I want to reach out with my own comms and make contact, give my callsign and my passwords. But Honey has a reason not to do this. Honey does not trust me with the reason. Whine.
The children of the village have set out containers with sugared water in for Bees. Some bring flowers. Father Estevan remonstrates with them about something called idolatry but I can tell he is not serious.
Four days after I first hear the ghosts, Honey comes to me. I have been waiting for her. Bad news has been on its way ever since the comms ghosts first arrived. Even the humans have been waiting for it, and they notice almost nothing.
She tells me: Rex, we are going to have to fight. My channel: Are enemies coming?
Honey takes a long time to answer that question. She gives me the answer I expect but do not want. What makes an enemy, Rex? Who decides?
More whining from me, but I say: I am leader. I decide.
Honey’s channel: So what is the answer? What makes an enemy?
My channel: People Master says.
Honey sighs. And if Master is not here.
My channel: Those who fight us.
Honey’s channel: Is it that simple?
I shake my head and bare my teeth and scratch in the dirt, all to try and keep from thinking about this. Mostly it is that simple. I think of the people of the village with their little guns, who might have fought us if Honey had not talked to them.
Honey moves on with her questions. Are people who fight us the only enemy?
I am on dangerous ground. Sometimes people who fight others are enemies.
Honey’s channel: That’s good, Rex. She pauses. Our comms traffic is so fast that a second’s gap can mean a long thinking pause between us. Rex, there are people coming who want to kill all the hum
ans here.
I whine again, deep in my throat.
Honey’s channel: Do you know what I mean by destroying the evidence, Rex?
I do not.
Honey’s channel: There are people coming who do not want anyone else to find this place and discover what they know. They are people who have done a bad thing, Rex. Already there are other humans who are asking questions about the bad things they have done. But these other humans do not have evidence, proof. So the people who have done the bad things, they need to destroy the proof. This village is part of the proof. It is just a little part, but it is still a part. Do you understand what I mean, Rex?
I do. I do not want to, but I do.
Honey only has one thing to say, now. When they come, will we fight them? Her statement from before, turned into a question.
And I say: Yes.
And so they come, and we will fight them.
Honey has been on the comms sending messages out. The humans are in the church and the other stronger buildings. Bees reports enemy activity under the tree cover to the west. There is a lot of open country for the cows between the trees and the village, but if you have the right sort of guns – like Dragon does – the distance does not mean much. Bees has not reported vehicle movements – moving through the trees with vehicles would be impossible, and these enemies want to remain under cover as long as possible. It reminds me of when we were with Master. We had vehicles, but we attacked on foot, at night.
Dogs of War Page 10