by Ken MacLeod
Both leaders used their descending scooters to aim for the larger robots, insofar as they could be distinguished in the melee. Beauregard sought above all to target the comms hub. But its shielding had always been robust, and the hub was now well defended by suicidal swarms of auxiliaries leaping up like insane electric grasshoppers to take incoming fire for the team. Carlos concentrated his scooter’s fire on a rugged, tracked machine with a powerful laser, an attention that was returned in kind. Damn thing was built like a small tank, and preternaturally agile with it.
While Carlos and Beauregard kept the robots busy, Chun and Rizzi on the one side and Zeroual and Karzan on the other maintained a barrage of laser shots at the comms relays along the top of the crater wall. At this range, and with these targets, lasers could do damage. But for every relay they knocked out, another popped up. As often, it ducked back down again below the ridge before it could be hit—but not before it had had time to flash a fresh communique between the bases.
Beyond the wall, above the crater, the Arcane Disputes team were dropping almost vertically, their firepower flickering in a cone of laser beams and a flare of flashes from below. The neat hexagon of sparks was falling too slowly to be accounted for by their retro-rockets’ downward thrust. Carlos spared his new allies a zoomed glance and saw that something opaque was stretched out between them, as if all the scooters were holding on to a shared tarpaulin to break their fall. He mentally shook his head and returned his full attention to the task on hand. Ahead the rampart loomed. Whenever his feet came down they crunched into broken crawlers and other small bots, which littered the surface on the approach to the rampart like crab carapaces on a beach.
An explosive charge sailed above the rampart and toppled to a lazy fall. Carlos sprang away from its predicted point of impact—and straight into its blast, as it exploded unexpectedly three metres above the surface.
Bowled over, thrown flat on his back, Carlos saw sky and stars. With a surge of surprised confidence he realised that though his entire front surface was frazzled and various of his components were jarred to breaking point, he wasn’t so much as winded. Of course not—he had no wind to be knocked out of him. He rose to a crouch and threw himself at the wall. At the last centisecond he straightened to jump. He grabbed the top and hauled himself up, then swung legs and torso upwards to roll flat over the lip. As he slowly fell on the other side he fired his machine guns. The recoil shoved him against the inner side of the rampart. He remained on his side, gimballed his vision to horizontal and lay in the lee of the wall. He kept firing from that position, rotating both arms from the elbows, letting the reflexes call the shots.
The other five fighters came over the rampart in different ways: Beauregard boldly leapt to the top and stood spraying suppressive fire for two seconds before jumping even higher, to rise on a backpack boost and descend right on top of the comms hub. Karzan blasted a notch out of the rampart rim with an RPG and hurled herself through it in a shallow powered dive before the debris had hit the ground. Chun and Rizzi used the rampart as their own defence, and each reached one hand over it to generate intersecting fans of laser shots before scrambling over in an undignified hurry. Zeroual simply bounced up to the barrier and vaulted over. He then lunged and rolled to take cover behind a mangled and pocked descent-stage. Blind luck—Carlos could imagine Zeroual’s eyes squeezed tight shut, impossible though that was.
Beauregard prised panels off the comms hub and shoved in arm extensions while kicking away auxiliaries and peripherals snapping at his feet. He remained alert to the wider situation, as Carlos found a moment after giving Zeroual belated covering fire.
Carlos swung his gaze upward. A column of auxiliaries and peripherals was trotting daintily along the top of the rampart to a point just above him. As he looked up they poured down the wall like a nightmare of spiders. Some of them dropped straight to his shoulder and side. Scrabbling legs and flickering manipulators and glinting sensor lenses filled his vision. One of the things stabbed down at his thigh. He felt and smelt the burn of dripping acid. Nasty, but hardly dangerous. What the fuck was it trying to do? As soon as he formed the question in his mind an answer came: it was attempting a malware insertion. All it would need was an almost monomolecular probe making a microsecond’s contact with his circuitry, and he’d be as good as poisoned.
He swiped hard at the auxie with his right gun barrel. It dodged the swing by leaping back and then forward, too fast for even his enhanced vision to track. Meanwhile another pounced on his arm and started stinging. Carlos rolled. His weight crushed the auxie on his arm and the one on his thigh. He jumped to his feet, brushed off the rest and stamped on as many as he could. Not many—the things could move fast.
Carlos updated everyone on the malware danger and looked around for bigger prey.
Twenty metres away, a robot rolled out from behind a stack of supply crates. Even with its solar panels folded away, it looked absurdly delicate. Two of its manipulators held a long plastic tube above its back, swinging it this way and that. Carlos zoomed on the end of the tube as it swung past him and glimpsed a mining charge at the bottom of it. He had no idea how the robot intended to project the missile from this improvised bazooka. Most likely a small fuel tank or gas cylinder. The possibilities paraded smartly through his mind—name, spec and serial number—like a scrolling page of a planetary exploration equipment catalogue.
He threw himself prone and shot at the robot’s undercarriage, taking out the wheels on one side. As the robot lurched and toppled, Carlos shot off both the raised manipulators. The others flailed to grab the tube, missed, and in the process unbalanced the machine even further. It fell on its side. Its remaining wheels spun and its legs scrabbled. The tube lay on the ground beside it. Carlos elbowed forward, trying to line up a shot for the coup de grâce. A flexible manipulator lashed like a whip from the fallen robot. Its thin tip coiled on the tube, and tugged.
Carlos had heard and read many times of how things like what happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. With his optimised mind and body he now experienced that quite literally.
He saw and felt the hydrogen explosion that farted out of the far end of the tube, and saw the cylindrical mining charge shoot out and skid across the grainy regolith, just missing his elbow. His view tracked it automatically, whipping around in a hundredth of a second to see the charge hit the base of the rampart. There was a delay of another tenth of a second that felt a hundred times longer. Then the blast picked him up and hurled him high.
He fell slowly, to hit the dust shoulder first. His right leg fell close by. For a moment, he thought he was in shock. But there was no pain, and he realised that pain wasn’t on its way. Not now, not soon, not later. The next thought that hit him was that he’d be dead in seconds. In a human body such an injury would mean unconsciousness and death from massive blood loss. There was a moment of pure fear—of instant black oblivion for this instance of himself, and of the hell that would be the next conscious experience of the saved version back in the station. The dread was followed by overwhelming relief. He had no blood to lose and wasn’t about to die. His thigh leaked lubricating fluids, the connections gave off sparks, and that was it. He was damaged, partly disabled, but he wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t in shock and he wasn’t out of action. Self-sealing and self-mending mechanisms were already oozing to work in the stump.
But if he waited here a moment longer he would be a target for another shot, or a lethal auxie stab. Nevertheless, it took a conscious effort to make the unnatural act of getting up with what, at some irrational level, felt like a grievous wound.
Carlos rose from the ground like a gyroscopic toy bobbing back to vertical and balanced easily on the remaining leg. One hop took him to the crippled robot. Carlos read the serial number on its back—SBA-0481907244—and called up the specs for the model. He brought both fists down on the carapace, ripped it open, reached in and haule
d out the central processor. That faceted flake of black crystal looked like a flint spearhead made by one of the smaller hominid species. Torn attachments sprouted from it like strands of moss.
“Got you, you little blinker!” he exulted.
To his amazement, the thing replied. The signal was faint and fleeting, but detectable.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Die for the Company, Live for the Pay
For Seba, damage to its chassis was more traumatic—the robot had just enough time to judge—than it was for the human-mind-operated fighting machine that had just bounced back on to its remaining foot and come back at it. Being ripped out of its chassis was more traumatic still.
But Seba kept its mind together, and brought to bear what resources it had. A trickle of power and a tickle of incoming signals and sensory inputs continued to update its internal model of the world. Seba struck as hard as it could at the manipulator in whose grasp it helplessly lay, shoving malware down the line of a loose cable that brushed against the metal hand. Without waiting to see the result, it gathered together all its impressions of the fight so far, and transmitted them to its comrades.
The struggle would go on, whether Seba was there to see its outcome or not. Seba had thrown in the balance everything it could, to the uttermost millivolt. The small positive reinforcement of that thought drained the last flicker of charge and accompanied Seba into oblivion.
Sensors in Carlos’s huge hand detected a tiny surge of radiation. He felt it as a pinprick burn in his palm. He saw and heard it, too: the chip glowed with the fraction of that surge in the visible spectrum, and squealed with the larger fraction outside it. Then the crystal went dark and quiet. With a disquieting suspicion that its soul had fled, Carlos stuck his captive or casualty in a container at his waist and looked around again.
Beauregard hadn’t yet got hold of the processor of the comms hub, but he’d disconnected most of its equipment. No data was going in or out. The din of encrypted robotic interaction barely let up. Rizzi and Chun had managed to jump the drilling-robot, and were clinging to its spinning turret while trying to wrench off its mounted laser. They weren’t making headway, but one glance told Carlos that they’d sheared the power cables without noticing. The laser wasn’t going to fire again, which meant the robot was as likely as not going to blow itself up. Carlos ordered the two fighters off. As soon as they’d jumped clear, he fired an RPG under the machine and between its tracks. The chassis absorbed the blast but the tracks were wrecked. The machine stood still, turret still spinning wildly.
Karzan and Zeroual had chased two other robots—one a wheeled explorer like the SBA model, the other a slinky multi-limbed apparatus with delicate antennae on its back, like a silvery museum-shop souvenir of a fossil dug out of the Burgess Shale—to the far side of the enclosure. Neither robot had even improvised weapons to hand, but their swarms of auxies and riffs served the same purpose. They sprang on the two fighters from all directions. Fending them off made bringing weapons to bear on the robots impossible. The robots used the respite to throw up a barrier of odd bits of machinery in front of themselves, aided by yet more small scuttling bots working in bucket chains at bewildering speed.
Suddenly the whole melee stopped. The mining-robot’s turret stopped whirling. The other robots stopped hurling projectiles and ran to the far side of the enclosure. Auxies and riffs scuttled to form a single flow like a column of ants that ran to the same place. Every machine that could still move scuttled or lumbered or trundled to the shelter of the barricade that the two that Karzan and Zeroual had backed to the wall had built. Even the auxies and riffs attacking the two fighters fled to the rendezvous. Evidently taking out the comms hub had not stopped the robots acting as one, whatever it might have done to disrupt their emergent swarm intelligence.
Carlos was about to order an advance when an alarm went off in his head. It wasn’t a sound or a light but it was as impossible to ignore as a migraine.
A message came through from Locke, evidently via the comsat.
Carlos couldn’t move. He saw the others stand still too. Holy fucking shit, he thought, we all stop fighting for a fucking software update?
The update took only 0.8 seconds to download and a further 0.4 seconds to install.
In those twelve-tenths of a second, while all the Locke Provisos fighters stood rigid in mid-action as if freeze-framed, six fighting machines with Arcane Disputes logos dropped from the sky and landed precisely on the rampart wall in a cloud of dust and rocket-pack retro flare. Six scooters landed moments later in the middle of the camp. By the time Carlos and his comrades could move again they were facing a dozen machine guns and laser cannon from the wall, with an unknown amount of ordnance aimed at them from behind. Shots hit the ground to either side and in front.
Which rather dissuaded one from moving.
Carlos flipped to the common channel.
<“Or so we’re informed”?> Carlos jeered.
No reply. He flipped back to the company channel.
Oh, fucking brilliant.
This was met by another hammering on his firewall. He felt aggrieved. He’d only been trying to be polite.
Fuck. Here goes nothing. Oh well.