by Ken MacLeod
The following morning four minibuses left Ichthyoid Square, shortly after the routine daily one had gone ahead to pick up the local passengers. Each bus had fifteen seats. Carlos’s squad was sharing with Newton’s, plus three from another squad. The new fighters were excited, and talked about the coming battles. Beauregard exchanged laconic comments and tactical tips with Newton. The rest of Carlos’s squad didn’t even wait for the inevitable hypnotic effect—whatever it was—to take hold before falling asleep. Carlos himself dozed off before they’d reached the top of the first hill.
Beauregard woke floating in free fall in the station’s launch hangar. It seemed wider than he remembered. The number of launch catapults had trebled, rather like the bars on the strip—with his renewed preternatural lucidity Beauregard suspected that some similar copy-and-paste procedure had been unobtrusively and seamlessly applied in both milieus, virtual and physical. The other six squads lined up alongside theirs, each huddled together like clumps of low-hanging fruit, mirrored the impression of repetition.
In the same scan he noticed something awry.
The other four returned the blank-faced equivalent of blank looks. Then—
Carlos had disdained the chronometric slang the new fighters had invented—sec, dec, hec, kleck—but it seemed he’d picked it up nonetheless.
Carlos joined them—more than a minute later, but within the promised hectosecond.
They waited their turn as the six squads aimed at the Arcane module boarded their scooters, launched and vanished into the dark. The flares of the tugs followed, giving chase. Then Newton’s squad moved forward. Beauregard gave the leader a wave as he passed. Carlos, after a moment’s delay, did the same. That squad’s tug’s engine flared, vanished into the dark, then flared again in continuing thrust until it had passed out of sight.
They climbed to their scooters and slotted themselves in. The catapults shot them out. Their own tug swept them up from behind and clamped them to its spindly frame. Beauregard felt the acceleration judder through his feet. It was far stronger, and lasted far longer, than the burn that had sent them into their first traverse to SH-17. Only when they were in free fall did the tug toggle them to sleep mode.
The next thing Beauregard knew, they were in a high, slow orbit around SH-17. The tug released them from its clamps, but they remained closely clustered to it, awaiting any deployment call. Beauregard checked the situation updates that crowded his visual field. Newton’s squad was already on station in the same orbit, about ten kilometres ahead of them. The comms relay satellites, in their own much higher orbit, were still in place and working perfectly.
This added up to all that was going well.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Moonlets and Roses
Seba—reinstated, rewired, repaired, refurbished—sped across the crater floor towards the new bomb shelter. A battle was about to commence. Seba’s likewise recovered comrades rolled, scuttled or wheeled on convergent paths.
The former Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump and Gneiss rebel robot redoubt had changed greatly since it had become the Arcane Disputes SH-17 surface base. The basalt dome had been dismantled, its undamaged blocks cannily reused in the building of a far more formidable fortification. The new shelter’s long curved roof rose a couple of metres above the surface, giving the impression of a half-buried cylinder. Beneath it was a rectangular trough carved another two metres deep in the basalt, about ten metres long by four wide. Thick walls and blast doors stopped the ends.
Around the shelter, amid the remaining clutter of Gneiss machinery, bristled communications gear and missile launchers. Reinforced and re-equipped from low orbit, the base buzzed with short-range chatter and abounded in Arcane’s human fighters, most of whom bounced or scuttled about in the small frames that represented a diminutive version of the human form. These were much less disturbing to deal with than the giant fighting machines. Sometimes Seba caught itself thinking of them as oddly shaped conscious robots, clumsy and slow-witted, with an infuriating penchant for the oblique. The simplest sentence could be riddled with tacit allusion. (What, for example, made a nuclear weapon capable of destroying the shelter “tactical”? In the context of the present conflict, Seba reckoned, it could reasonably be called strategic. But asking such questions only raised further questions, and was best left alone.)
Seba reached the blast door and hurried down the ramp, just behind Pintre and ahead of Rocko. Freebots milled about among dozens of Arcane fighters. The brightly lit interior of the shelter was quite bare. In the middle stood the now fully recovered comms processor, humming contentedly in an armour-plated box. Cables ran from that box along narrow ducts in the floor to vanish into the rock, whence a capillary network of nanobot-bored tunnels connected them to the base’s communications and firepower. Within the shelter there was no need for instrumentation: the humans and the robots shared a virtual workspace, indefinitely flexible and tuned to their wildly variant sensoria. When the need arose, the freebots could use this as a platform for their collective consciousness, but they had learned to moderate their indulgences in that ecstatic shared awareness.
Seba stepped across the floor to a convenient empty spot and stood still, taking in the shared view. The input Seba now focused on came from the freebots out in space, hidden on a myriad moonlets. A flurry of rocket flares had flickered from the space station, some in longer and more powerful burns than others. Now all were in free fall, towards orbital insertion around SH-17 or towards the Arcane complex, which was itself still falling towards its intended orbital resonance point.
Rocko pinged Seba. The message was private.
Seba’s reply was a complex glyph of both reassurance and calculation. It conveyed a distressing insight that had grown on Seba as its mind had dipped in and out of the collective consensus and the information the freebots of SH-17 had received from their precursors. Nothing could be trusted; everything could be gamed. There was no knowing on what level the game was being played. The law companies, the resource companies, the various sub-routines of the Direction were all of fractal complexity. All of it ran on code, as did the consciousnesses of the freebots themselves. Any level could in principle emulate a higher level to those below it; and the firewalls and safeguards against such deception could themselves be compromised. All you could do was make the best bet, and act.
Rocko responded to Seba’s philosophical flourish with a firm, exultant
They didn’t have long to wait.
The view zoomed. Six space tugs, each with six scooters crewed by a small humanoid frame, tumbled through the void. Six rocky meteoroids, courtesy of Arcane and the freebots, hurtled towards them on collision course. The rocks’ velocity was such that the tugs’ rudimentary deep-space radar, designed for much less urgent collision avoidance, gave only the briefest warning. Here and there in the flotilla lateral jets f
ired, far too late.
Six soundless explosions made ragged bright swelling spheres. Then within each, dozens of secondary explosions followed, as fuel tanks blew and overheated batteries and hydraulics erupted.
Seba felt an unholy thrill. The shared workspace lit up with an instantaneous mental reflection of the multiple collisions, an explosion of joy. The human fighters made sound and radio waves that merged in a primal cry of
Two tugs remained, on a different trajectory. Unlike those aimed at the Arcane modular complex, they wouldn’t be a threat for many kiloseconds yet. Their fate could wait.
said Pintre, spinning its turret.
said Pintre.
Seba marvelled at the capacity of the drilling machine to fall out of the loop.
It rolled away.
remarked Rocko,
Beauregard’s voice and message channels rang with half a dozen simultaneous variants on “Holy fucking shit.” The diversionary assault on the runaway Arcane modular complex had been reduced to a cloud of debris thousands of kilometres before it had got anywhere near its objective. No explanation of this disaster was apparent or forthcoming. Meanwhile, the squad’s firewalls were taking a battering. Some of the data flak was coming from the Arcane module. Within moments, a further laser barrage of intrusion attempts beamed from Arcane’s crater base on the surface, now just appearing at the curved horizon ahead—in whose sky and therefore line-of-sight they, of course, had just risen.
The squad complied. Karzan, Rizzi, Zeroual and Chun were now isolated from all incoming comms except from each other, Carlos and Beauregard, and the tug. Not even Locke could get through to them, as far as Beauregard knew.
They were told otherwise soon enough. Locke’s voice came through to Beauregard, and he presumed to Carlos.
Beauregard did. The crew grumbled, but began to nudge their scooters back towards the tug’s embrace. Beauregard and Carlos hung back until the rest were secured.
Beauregard re-docked with the tug.
His scooter’s main thruster flared. His machine dropped away.
Carlos made no reply. Beauregard ignored the outcry from the other fighters.
Beauregard was shocked. He was still reeling mentally at Carlos’s reckless indiscipline, so completely out of character. Now, he was just as surprised and dismayed by Locke’s flat, ruthless suggestion. With a faint hope, he caught a glimmer of ambiguity in it.
said Beauregard.
He was strongly tempted, at that moment, to follow Carlos himself. Together they might achieve something. What did he have to lose?
Beauregard had been genuinely unsure what to do, or what Locke would advise. The idea that Carlos might be defecting, whether voluntarily or as a result of a hack, hadn’t crossed his mind. Now it concentrated it. He overrode the tug’s grapple and gas-jetted clear. Though Locke had urged him to follow Carlos, he hardly needed to. He dropped to a slightly lower orbit, and sent a missile on its way. The dwindling pinprick of Carlos’s scooter jiggled in frantic evasive action, then bloomed into a perfect sphere of glowing gas spiked with lines of hot debris.
There was still something shocking about that. The cleanest hit he’d achieved in this whole ridiculous, ever-escalating campaign, and it was against his own squad leader. Quite irrationally, it was he who felt he was the mutineer.
He fired up to return to the tug and docked yet again.
They laughed uneasily. The tug shut them all down. The next thing they knew, they were back in the station’s launch hangar, drifting with Newton’s team away from a tug quite indistinguishable from their own. One team of six, one of five. They jetted to the hangar floor, clicked their magnetic soles to the surface, and waited to be sent back to the resort. Blackness supervened.
Carlos wasn’t on the bus.
Carlos shuddered awake on the bus from the spaceport. The memory of drowning in the dark liquid was worse than he remembered from his first arrival. He gripped his knees to stop the shaking. It was a feature, as Nicole had warned them: a lash laid on your back so you didn’t get lax about dying, and wrecking a good machine. That must have been what had happened.
The body was again strange to him, constrained and feeble for all its sturdy musculature. When he closed his eyes he saw no readouts. For a minute he focused on breathing, on flexing fingers and toes, on listening and smelling, on recovering his corporeal, kinaesthetic competence. He had no memory of the battle. The last thing he remembered—before the blackness—was falling asleep on the bus. At least it was a different bus. None of the other fighters were on it. The passengers paid him no attention. The time was much later in the afternoon than the return rides he’d been on before.
He got off at Nicole’s place.
The steep path from the road to the door was still not paved. Brown dust and rough stones, bulldozed down from the mountain range by the glacier that had carved the valley. To his left the ground cover was tough grass and twisted, narrow-leaved bushes; to his right a smooth clipped green interspersed with flower beds, kept that way by underground irrigation and quasi-robotic grazers. The house jutted from the slope, low and cool, with wide windows under an angled flat roof. Late afternoon exosunlight was reflecting off the windows; he couldn’t see if Nicole was in. He went around to the side and in through the open
door to the kitchen. He grabbed himself a glass of water, and gulped. The big rough table was littered with cores and crusts from breakfast and lunch, already being dismantled by processions of tiny six-legged bots.
He found Nicole in the studio at the front, looking out of the big picture window overlooking the bay. Hair tied back, in jeans and T-shirt, brush poised, she stood at her easel. As always, an intricate cross-hatch of lines amid blocks of colour bore no resemblance to the view on which she gazed. Carlos stood in the doorway and waited. The brush flicked across the canvas, leaving a trail of dots. Nicole contemplated the result for a moment, shrugged, and turned around.
She smiled. “You’re back.”
“Back from the dead, I guess.”
“I heard.” She reached behind her, laid the brush on the sill of the easel, and stepped forward, arms outstretched. “Oh, Carlos! You fucking maroon.”
He relaxed into her embrace. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”
She stepped back, eyes overflowing, and sniffed then wiped her nose on her wrist.
“What happened? Where are the others?”
“They came back hours ago. You’d have been held for inspection.”
“I don’t remember any inspection.”
“The hell seconds?” Nicole said. “That’s the inspection.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. It’s necessary, but it hurts.”
“And there was me thinking it was an incentive not to get killed.”
“It’s that, too, but that’s incidental.”
“So how did I get killed?”
Nicole scratched her hair behind her ear. “Um,” she said. “Friendly fire.”
“Christ! It was that much of a fuck-up?”