by Ken MacLeod
They followed the line around descent stages, crates, nanofacturing kit, complex pipework, unloaded cargo, unattended but busy machinery. The base resembled a construction site for a chemical plant, rather than anything military. The line ended in a circle five metres wide.
As they stepped inside it, a virtual image of a round table appeared at the centre. Behind it, bizarrely, stood a slender man of their own height. He was of late middle age, with thin features, a long nose and bright hooded eyes. His wavy white hair went down to the open collar of a white shirt under a loose brown coat.
They all stopped and stared. The sight of an unprotected, diminutive human on the alien surface was too unreal to take in. He, or a process going on around them, must have registered their disquiet. Quite suddenly and seamlessly, the circle was extended into a dome, transparent and with hexagon panels. The whole thing was as virtual as the line itself; the atmosphere inside hadn’t changed at all.
The man exhaled loudly, then took a deep gasp as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time.
“That’s better,” he said, and joined in their laughter.
Carlos suspected it wasn’t, and that the performance had been to put them at their ease. In that, he noticed with a certain wry disdain of himself, it had succeeded.
Carlos nodded, and saw five featureless black eggs nod likewise, light from the exosun and the superhabitable planet reflecting off their glossy curves like distorted eyes. Yes, boss, this isn’t weird at all.
The avatar took from a fold of his coat a plume-shaped light-pen and moved it above the table, gradually sketching in and simultaneously summoning an increasingly detailed map and diagram, explaining as he went. Just beyond the terminator was a large crater. On the nearest side of the crater wall was what had been the Astro America landing site; on the other, the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Eight renegade robots in the one, six in the other, plus the auxiliary robots and other machinery they’d suborned, all of them connected via an improvised but hardened local network. The task was to capture or destroy the eight robots at the Astro site; those at the other site would meanwhile be taken care of by another law company, Arcane Disputes, which held the Gneiss account. Locke recounted in outline the company’s previous attempts to take the Astro site, with a certain pinched sarcasm.
When the avatar had finished talking and light-sketching, Carlos and Beauregard worked out a plan of attack that almost wrote itself. The tactics seemed self-evident, but as the squad came to a consensus Carlos found himself perplexed.
“We’ve been through all this—revival, simulation, training—just to stomp on half a dozen little robots?”
As soon as he said it, he had to choke back a laugh at himself.
Locke swept them all with a look.
Half a dozen little robots shared sidelong glances.
“Point,” Carlos conceded.
“We’ll need better odds than even,” said Beauregard. “Defenders’ advantage, and all that.”
said Carlos.
The Locke avatar affected a horrified expression.
They couldn’t have seemed impressed.
Beauregard waved an arm, an expansive gesture that would have carried more weight if he hadn’t been so small.
Locke laughed.
Unlike you lot, he didn’t need to say.
He looked around, as if daring anyone to ask another question. No one did.
The virtual dome disappeared. The avatar strode confidently off, walking as if nothing were less remarkable on SH-17 than an eighteenth-century philosopher strolling in normal gravity and breathing actual air, and quite as if the fighters were now so inured to their bizarre situation that the sight wouldn’t freak them out. The fighters followed, through mazes of yet more machines and components apparently scattered at random but more likely in an order that made sense to algorithms beyond human computational capacity. At the end of a canyon between stacked crates Locke stopped, and flung out his arm with a bow.
“Behold the fighting machines.”
The six little robots crowded out of the gap, and beheld. They looked up, and up. In front of them, like a row of heroic statues by a modernist sculptor working in cast iron, stood six humanoid shapes in full space armour, crusted with sensors and effectors, bristling with weapons. They were each three metres tall. Alongside them stood the scooters, now refuelled and refurbished—not for carrying the fighting machines, Carlos realised, but to operate as semi-autonomous drones in close overhead support.
Carlos had already read the schematic of the thing, and could see the operator socket clearly marked on its nape. He snorted.
“Jump.”
Jump they did, like monkeys leaping on to human backs. As he soared, Carlos had plenty of time to predict where he’d land. He grabbed hold of a handy protuberance on a weapons rack between the shoulders, and heaved himself up the back of the neck and into the slot in the base of the giant robot’s head. There was no visible articulation anywhere on this thing—the surfaces were rugged, matt, the colour of rust, made from layers of subtle and supple metamaterials. The head was not quite hollow. He pushed his way in and slid himself into place. The space inside was shaped to hold him in a hunched, seated position, as if in a cramped cockpit packed with sponge.
As he’d found with the scooter, there was a moment when it
felt like being a pilot or operator of a vehicle, while the connections were still being made, and—as in his first training on the crude simulator—a moment of claustrophobia. Then came the next moment, when everything clicked into place, and he was no longer squeezed into the machine’s head. He was the machine, and its head was his. The little, foetal frame was no longer his body.
He moved the head, and was amused and somewhat disquieted to find that his visual field could move independently. It was wider than that provided by his natural (and his simulated) eyes, and could sweep through 360 degrees in all directions. This would have been a handy feature in the small frame, too. Carlos could only guess why it wasn’t included—perhaps there just wasn’t room to include these optics along with all the other astonishing hardware and software of the kit, or perhaps the designers wanted that body to feel not too far removed from the human.
He looked around, seeing the frames beside him come to life, and seeing a lot farther than he had before. The horizon was close now. The avatar still stood on the ground, looking tiny, looking up. Carlos swung a mechanical arm in an experimental wave, then stretched the arm out in front of him and raised a foot-long thumb. Locke waved back, and disappeared. Carlos sent after him a far from fond farewell, a thought he hoped hadn’t been transcribed into a message, and continued to look around.
It was absurd how much difference his increased size made. The feeling was almost familiar, perhaps from a trace of uncorrupted muscle memory since the time when his virtual body image had straddled the Thames. Now he was a monster again, in body and not just in whatever warped corner of his mind that past experience lurked. It felt good.
Carlos flexed his arms, rotated his forearms and admired then checked over the heavy machine guns and laser cannon mounted between elbow and wrist. He reached over his shoulder to the RPG rack on his back and clocked the missiles one by one, each tiny mind a fierce red eye in the dark. In symmetrical sweeps around the rack were the tubes of the rocket pack. Somewhere in his own mind, the status and position of each squad member was as evident as that of his limbs.
He conjured a shared workspace and sketched as he spoke.
He added a few details.
Everyone was.
A view from the stationary satellite, detail snatched and patched from high-flying overhead cam drones too small and fast for the renegades to spot, let alone shoot at. The two rebel bases, with the crater wall between them, their fortifications clearly visible. Overlay of a spider-web line-of-sight laser comms net, some of it presumed or deduced. Some of the robots’ comms were definitely aimed outward, and their direction shifted rapidly from point to point, but so far their content had been impossible to crack. The present position and deployment of their expected allies in this battle—the Arcane Disputes squad, riding a tug in low orbit, currently well below the horizon and coming up fast, scheduled to arrive at the same time as the Locke Provisos team on the ground.
These were all familiar from the avatar’s briefing. What was new and startling was the level and nature of activity within the rampart of the Astro base and around the dome at the Gneiss site. Both places seethed with movement like nests of disturbed ants. No distinction could be made between the dozen renegade robots and the uncorrupted ones and the dumb machinery and the auxiliaries and the peripherals: they all moved as one, in floods and flows. Encrypted radio chatter and laser flicker glowed in the relevant spectra of the chart. Carlos had to slow it down a thousandfold to get any sense of the pulse of traffic. What he saw reminded him of nothing so much as of a high-school graphic of neural activity. Intricate networks formed and vanished, connections were made and broken, in every instant. Zooming out and returning to real time, he saw the physical counterpart, the deliberate frenzy of perfectly coordinated activity. Weapon emplacements, comms relays, reinforcements of the already impressive fortifications appeared to spring up in seconds, and then yet more.
The six fighting machines bounded across the plain. No longer clumsy, they moved with precision in long low leaps, jumping and landing on both feet. The plain was more uneven than it looked, dotted with craters, crazy-paved with rilles and cracks. The fighting machines’ reflexes and the occasional rocket-pack boost kept them coming down on reliable surfaces. Soon they had passed the terminator. The exosun sank behind. SH-17 rose higher ahead. The team’s sight adjusted imperceptibly to its pale light.
After a few kilometres they split up. Carlos, Chun and Rizzi struck off on a diagonal path to the left; Beauregard, Zeroual and Karzan to the right. Keeping below the rebels’ horizon and maintaining radio silence until the actual attack was almost underway was part of the original plan, but might now be obsolete: the robot nests might well have succeeded in hacking into a satellite or even the space station, and be getting a view from above already. But at least it kept the squad out of direct line-of-sight laser targeting, for now.
Their pincer movement took both halves of the squad to opposite ends of a line between the crater wall and the Astro rebel fortification. Carlos could see the disposition on the display, but as agreed he stopped and double-checked that everyone was in position.
Carlos spared a thought for his squad’s counterparts in the other company’s team, at that moment preparing to hurtle out of the sky. He had no idea what frames they were using or what their tactical approach would be, but could guess they would be tense. He knew nothing more than that there were six of them, but he presumed they were revived—and reviled—Axle veterans like himself.
Eight point nine seconds until the Arcane tug rose. Carlos reached mentally behind himself, catching the scooter’s metal breath, the adrenaline-like surge of fuel, the ignition spark. Eight point eight seconds.
Far behind him, the two scooters lifted from Locke Provisos Emergency Base One on a suborbital trajectory that would take them down in the middle of the Astro site. At the same moment, Carlos and Beauregard led their trios in bounding forward, their jumps boosted by bursts from their rocket packs. The regolith rampart appeared on the horizon to Carlos’s right, the crater wall to his left. He struck a bearing to the right, aiming to arrive closer to the rampart than the crater.
His radar caught an incoming blip, arcing down on course to hit him on his next bounce.
Everyone soared to a hundred metres up. The missile passed beneath them and exploded behind them. At the top of their jump laser fire licked their faces. No damage. Carlos aimed a far more powerful beam the other way. As he hit the ground he saw a flash behind the rampart, and cheered inwardly.
Then the
laser lashed forth again. Damn.
Away to his left, above the crater wall, the tug climbed in the sky. Six fiery dots spilt from it, dropping much faster than his own squad’s entry had been. He guessed the fighters would be in battle-ready frames, and therefore heavier than the small frames in which the Locke crew had ridden down. Instant intuitive calculation showed him that the Arcane scooters would have enough fuel to fire retros and land, but not enough to take off again without refuelling. Unexpected tactics indeed. Two more dots fell from the tug, making another fast descent. Back-up supplies, no doubt.
Forward, bounce, boost, get a shot off, land, repeat.
As planned, Chun and Rizzi veered left, nearing the crater wall and dividing the target for the enemy. More laser fire strobed across them, still not strong enough to hurt, but getting dangerous—Carlos experienced the damage as a smell of burning rubber. He drew an RPG from his shoulder rack, gave it its target in a coded tremor of fingertip pressure, and threw. The rocket torched off and streaked away, on an all but horizontal course. It exploded well before it got to the rampart, milliseconds from contact. Wasted.
But his and Beauregard’s scooters were now dropping from the sky. Carlos patched a quarter of his view—half an eye, as it were—to the descending vehicle. From there he saw the regolith-circled base, and the swarming scurry that boiled within. Laser beams stabbed upward, and were deflected. Crude projectiles hurtled up, to bounce off the scooter’s sides.
The scooter spat precision ordnance as it came down, its retros blowing dust all around. A few metres farther up, Beauregard’s vehicle did the same. Not quite as confident or accurate as he was, Carlos gauged, a harsh judgement rendered fair by the metrics of the frame’s cold eye. Beauregard was smart, and had brought with him military training from his first life, but he didn’t have Carlos’s experience of drone warfare deep in his muscle memory… or whatever analogy of that still reverberated in Carlos’s copied mind.