by Ken MacLeod
The rig looked undamaged. A few maintenance bots had refuelled it. Carlos checked it over.
Carlos complied, then climbed on one-handed. He clamped his right armpit over a spar and his left hand around another. He couldn’t turn his head to look back, but he didn’t need to. He swivelled his vision and saw Locke looking up at him. The avatar waved. Feeling foolish, Carlos let go his left hand for a moment and waved back. The engine kicked in and the rig began its ascent. Carlos couldn’t see the projector, but there could be no doubt about its fate. The avatar vanished before the dust from the downdraught blew over where it had stood.
“What the fuck?” cried Rizzi. “What the fucking fuck?”
<“But,” indeed,> replied Carlos.
Low SH-17 orbit had suddenly become a busy place, and a hot destination. Two Arcane Disputes tugs had just made orbital insertion, and ten more were on their way from the renegade agency’s runaway module. Meanwhile, the number of small natural objects unnaturally captured, and swinging around the exomoon in looping elliptical orbits whose projected, predicted tracks increasingly resembled a cat’s cradle, had risen to seven.
A few dark chuckles cluttered the voice channel.
Nobody said anything, but Carlos felt he had a pretty good idea what they must all be thinking. Whatever the Arcane troops were being told had to be persuasive. At least as persuasive as what Nicole had told them about the threat presented by Arcane’s going rogue and its possible corruption by the rebel robots…
The tug arrived, the rig boosted to match orbits and velocities, and the fighters transferred. It took them out of sleep mode as it docked at the station. On the way to the hatch they caught glimpses of scooters manoeuvring within a few hundred metres, just as they had. It looked like Arcane’s escalation wasn’t going to go unanswered.
The others remained where they were, stock-still and unresponsive. Their minds were no doubt back on the bus already. As he lifted and lowered his magnetic soles along a virtual line on the floor, Carlos saw more and more replacement scooters emerge from the tubes that led to the nanofacture chambers. The repair workshop was a cavern of inward-reaching automated tools, of pinpoint lighting and scuttling bots. Carlos stepped over its threshold and was caught and briskly laid against a central floating table beneath a ceiling-mounted robot that looked like it was made entirely from multi-tools. A glittering, complex device unfolded, and clamped on his upper right arm.
Everything went black, and then he was with the others on the bus, with a fading memory of wind on his face from the salt flats around the spaceport, saline dust dry and gritty in his nostrils, sore on his eyes. He coughed and blinked hard.
“Have a swig of this, soldier,” said the woman on the seat beside him. “It’ll make you feel better.”
The look of the liquor had Carlos doubting that, but he thanked her and took the bottle and drank.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
War News
At first, as the bus came down the slope to the main street of the resort, Carlos thought that the crowd welcoming them was going to be bigger than before. The street was busier than he’d ever seen it. New housing had been built along the hillside. The amusement arcade, the one with the frame and scooter simulators, had trebled in size. More umbrellas were on the beach, and swimmers in the sea.
When he stepped down on the pavement however, only Chun’s boyfriend, Den, and Tourmaline were at the stop to greet them. He wasn’t bothered by Nicole’s absence—this time, he’d remembered to check his phone, and found a message saying she’d meet him in the Touch in an hour or so. All the shops on the arcade were open, and the street was thronged with so many young men and women strolling and chatting and buying beachwear and swigging from cans and licking at cones that it looked like a coach-load or two of singles and couples tourists had just disembarked. The difference was that when you looked past the gaudy sun hats and flashy shades and colourful beach bags you saw they were all wearing khaki T-shirts and trousers and boots.
“Christ,” said Rizzi, weaving her way along the thronged pavement with one arm around Den, “you find some nice wee unspoiled place for the holidays, and the next thing you know it’s overrun by fucking Club Med.”
“Comparable to the worst excesses of the French Revolution,” said Chun, fanning his face with his hand.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” said Carlos. He didn’t recognise anyone—no surprise, after his student days he’d barely met another Accelerationist except
online—but several did a double take when they saw him. He kept a lookout for Jacqueline Digby, but that was more a passing nod to an old flame than a spark of new hope.
Beauregard, to Carlos’s surprise, camped it up right back. “The heat! The noise! And worst of all, the people!”
“Stop bitching,” said Karzan, struggling along behind them. “We have new comrades!”
“Yeah, that’s what’s bad about it,” said Carlos. “How the fuck are we supposed to train and integrate scores of new fighters?”
“Think about it,” said Beauregard. “How long have we been away? Hours. That’s months here. Time enough to train them all. Even since we lifted from SH-17, they’ll have had more time than we had.”
“More to the point,” said Carlos, covering his annoyance with himself for not having thought it through, “how are we going to find seats in the Touch?”
They all laughed, a little ruefully. But it turned out they had nothing to worry about. Other bars and cafés had opened along the seafront to meet the new demand, and the Digital Touch was as half empty and welcoming as it had always been. This time, Carlos did manage to buy the first round.
“The real worry,” said Beauregard, out on the deck, a beer in his hand and Tourmaline on his knee, “is whether we’re supposed to lead all these new recruits.” He looked around from one face to another, shaking his head. “Can’t see all of you lot becoming generals. Or any of you, come to that.”
“Thank you, sarge,” said Zeroual. “I was a colonel in the Tunisian army and a brigade commander in the resistance.”
“And your point would be?” Beauregard said.
Zeroual’s smile was thinner than his moustache. “Nevertheless, we may have something to teach the newcomers.”
“No doubt the lady will tell us in due course,” said Karzan. “Meanwhile, and speaking of ‘course,’ here comes our first.”
Seafoods and salads were indeed arriving.
“I’ve warned you before about attempting English puns,” said Beauregard. “Even Tourmaline can do better than that. No offence, sweetie.”
“None taken,” said Tourmaline, reaching for a hot mollusc. “I’ll take this instead. Always did like mussels.” She nudged Beauregard’s triceps.
“You’re not doing my case any favours,” Beauregard grouched.
“Nah, they’re not favours, they’re starters,” said Tourmaline, taking another.
Beauregard put his head in his hands and groaned.
When Nicole arrived she didn’t waste time in explaining developments. She called them all inside to watch the television screen above the bar. A few of the local regulars were present, and a gaggle of newcomers who regarded the veterans askance and with evident awe. The squad and their camp followers commandeered a couple of tables, ordered another round and settled down.
The screen was reaching the end of an episode of its midday soap opera, a convoluted and never-ending tale set in a Moon colony corridor, originally in Yoruba and dubbed into the local synthetic language. That they now all spoke it made the plot even less comprehensible than it had been when the dialogue had been so much babble. The usual portentous closing drumbeats and frozen shocked faces signalled the day’s cliffhanger ending. The hour turned over. A trumpet bray and swirl of colour announced something none of the fighters had ever seen before on local television, but which everyone else there—locals, bar staff, recent recruits—had apparently got used to: news.
What Carlos expected from that medium and format was breathless and brainless: flashy graphics, grainy pictures; jingoism and talking airheads. Back in the day, he’d become hardened to air war, drone war, media and online war, information overload filtered to sound bite and gore-shock.
What he got was far more sober. It took him a moment to realise that the difference in tone was all about moments: the thousandfold discrepant timescales of the sim and the real outside worlds. The news was presented entirely as if the sim really was the planet H-0, and the conflict was going on far away around SH-0. The transfer of fighters to and from the sim was described—never quite explicitly stated, but taken for granted, shared and tacit—as if happening by long-range tight-beam transmission. Everything happened, from the point of view of his own experiences, in slow motion. The deployments to and from the station were like the movements of fleets in a naval conflict. What he’d lived through as small-scale infantry skirmishes on the ground happened like tank battles, with long ponderous manoeuvres giving way to brief decisive exchanges of fire, above and through which the scooters wallowed like blimps.
The runaway Arcane Disputes modular complex was, on this scale, a mighty floating fortress breaking away from the mainland of the station and making its stately course to a new and distant ocean. Safer to let it go than to fight it too close to home, and with its intent as yet unclear.
The absence of sensational coverage almost dulled the shock of realising what was going on, on both sides. Locke Provisos had by now mobilised as many walking dead war criminals—those khaki-clad tourists outside, and at the adjacent tables—as it feasibly could: ninety, including his own squad. Two other agencies, Morlock Arms and Zheng Reconciliation Services, had already done the same.
Arcane Disputes was raising troops, too—and doing something far more dangerous.
It was mobilising the enemy itself. This was no incomprehensible, dog-in-the-manger escalation of their dispute with Locke, Astro, and indeed with Gneiss. The agency wasn’t just hanging on to the robots it had captured. It was actively siding with them.
The rebel robots on SH-17 had, it now turned out, made contact with holdouts from the previous outbreak of machine consciousness that had been crushed one Earth year or so earlier. Some of these had lurked in the distant gas giant G-0 system, dormant but alert. Others had lain low among the many small exomoons (and moonlets of exomoons) around SH-17. Worst-case scenarios were that some rogue AIs were hidden inside the software and hardware of the station itself. Only a handful of the original insurgent intelligences might have initially survived, but that didn’t matter. Replicating macroscale robotic machinery required only the dispersal of microscale packages, propelled by tiny lightsails on the exosolar flux like thistledown on wind. All that these seeds had to do to flourish was fall on stony ground.
Those around SH-0 had burrowed deep inside the small bodies, turning machinery intended for exploring and construction to their own purposes. Literally under deep cover, within fragments of rubble too small to have been more than catalogued as yet, they had built the capacity to listen, to observe, to act—and to move the entire rock. Some of these micro-moons were in effect spacecraft. What this could lead to Carlos knew all too well from the kinetic weapon warning shots.
Now, with the emergence of an open revolt among newly conscious robots—the term “freebots,” Carlos noted with some disquiet, had slipped into the news analysts’ and presenters’ discourse, from God knew where but quite possibly from Arcane or the rebel robots themselves—the dormant and hidden remnants of the defeated outbreak had emerged like sleeper cells.
And now they were allied with, or had subverted, or had themselves been manipulated by Arcane Disputes. Nobody knew which of these, or some combination or variant thereof, was true. Nobody could even be sure that the truth didn’t lie with some alternative entirely.
The wildest speculation was that Arcane and the freebots were all being controlled by an outside force. It was established fact that there was multicellular alien life on SH-0. What if some of it was intelligent, or at least purposeful, and had seized the opportunity to disrupt the ongoing human invasion of the system? That idea generally got short shrift, but even the sober possibilities were disturbing.
Disturbing, Carlos thought, was not quite the word. Whatever was going on, the entire mission profile—the whole vast project of settlement and terraforming—was being put in jeopardy.
“This is fucking insane,” said Rizzi, when the half-hour of news was over. “Why are you letting t
hem get away with it?”
“We’re not letting them get away with it,” said Nicole, sounding uncharacteristically irritable and defensive. She waved a hand about, the gesture encompassing the new fighters nearby and the others out on the street. “We’re preparing to hit them with everything we’ve got.”
“With respect,” said Beauregard, “that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“How so?” Nicole asked, eyes narrowing.
“I know you’re pulling up more troops, building more fighting machines and spacecraft and so on, but come on. Those Arcane fuckers and blinkers are playing with fire. You brought us back from the dead just to take out a dozen conscious robots. Now you’ve got all of them plus an unknown number of others, and an agency with as much capacity to churn out weapons as we have. And raise many more fighters, if they go down that route. Or arm robots and freebots, come to that, which would be even worse. These so-called freebots obviously have the capacity to make weapons—at least kinetic and ballistic—of their own. They hit us with them. OK, warning shots, but we got the message loud and clear. If you were hitting them with everything you’ve got, you wouldn’t be pussy-footing around with infantry and aerospace. You’d be hitting their base on SH-17 and all their little moons and the goddamn Arcane module itself with KE and HE weapons. Pulverise them to rubble and be done with it, then fry any leftover robot minds and human uploads with EMP. And, yes, I do mean an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon if necessary.”
“But—”
Beauregard raised a hand. “I know all about the delicate and complex question of property rights and the value of the scientific knowledge and incalculable future benefits that might be derived from keeping SH-17 et cetera as pristine as possible, and all the wretched rest of it. Your holographic philosopher explained all that to us down there on the moon. But any cost-benefit analysis—heck, common sense—would tell you that it’s better to lose a little than to lose a lot, and to risk losing everything. Remember what you said about being at the mercy of intellects with no mercy and lots of curiosity? Remember you said to us, when you were hyping us up for this fight, ‘I advise you not to lose’? Well, lady, right here and now that’s what I advise you.”