by Ken MacLeod
Carlos eventually fought his way to holding both of Beauregard’s wrists. This grip momentarily left Beauregard’s feet free. He brought his knees to his chest and stamped both heels at Carlos’s midriff. The impact broke Carlos’s hold and sent the two antagonists flying in opposite directions.
The wrong directions, from Beauregard’s point of view.
Perhaps confused by their whirling fight, he kicked out at the wrong moment. He went flying back, to be snagged and spun around by the waiting arms of the spider-bot, now guarding the workshop hatchway. Carlos hurtled out of the corridor and into the hangar. Flailing, he blundered into a phalanx of Morlock Arms fighters, still in free fall and drifting towards the cavernous rectangular grin of the launch slot. Their ranks broke up into colliding cartwheels as Carlos starfished through like a spinning shuriken. A dozen or so impacts on heads, torsos and extremities slowed and steadied Carlos. With both feet on someone’s shoulders, he looked around for a way of escape before anyone thought to seize him.
The parade of scooters was still going by, like an aerial fly-past at a military display for some short ambitious tyrant. Carlos jumped. His thrust of feet down on shoulders sent the unlucky fighter crashing into a cascade of companions, and Carlos flying up to the nearest scooter. He grabbed a skid and clambered over the craft’s carapace to the control socket. As he snaked himself in he found all the connections live and lighting up. The machinery of the frame connected with the control circuitry of the scooter. As suddenly and sharply as ever, he found himself one with the machine.
He pushed down with his feet and eased up with his hands, angling the scooter above the repetitive procession of its identical counterparts, and thrust forwards above them faster and faster, to fly through the gap between the launch catapults and out of the station into the welcoming dark and blazing light and humming smells and screaming sounds of space.
Beauregard at last freed himself from the spider-bot by applying all the strength of his hands and arms to systematically snap every limb of it, until the device ran out of limbs. A kick at the rim of the hatch launched him down the corridor, caroming off this side and that until he reached the opening to the hangar. He grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and took stock. Carlos was nowhere to be seen. A roil of fighters flailing back into formation, and a single gap in the echelons of scooters moving towards the launch catapults, tracked his passage and left an unsubtle clue as to where and how the mad treacherous fucker had fled.
Beauregard’s comms channels rang with indignant queries—from his own squad, from Newton, and from the Morlock Arms contingent that Carlos had disrupted. Locke would be on the case any second now, breathing fire and demanding an accounting. Beauregard chose to pre-empt that. He cut across the incoming babble and called the company.
Beauregard assumed that Locke knew the preceding circumstances perfectly well from internal surveillance. If not contemporaneous—the AI having more pressing matters on its mind than snooping on obscure corridors and repair workshops—a simple track-back from Carlos’s abrupt emergence in and hasty departure from the hangar would do the trick. Locke would be checking Beauregard’s version of the story against the record. Beauregard chose his words with care.
Beauregard relayed the order to Chun, Karzan, Rizzi and Zeroual. A general call brayed across the common channel. It was as if Locke’s normal quiet, insistent voice-in-the-head had been amplified, and become as impossible to ignore as a nearby pneumatic drill.
Beauregard watched as four fighters drifting forward with the rest dropped out of the ranks and jetted to the floor, where they stood in a disconsolate huddle as the parade passed by. He jetted over to join them. On the way he called Newton, who with his squad was just ahead of where Carlos’s had been.
Beauregard burned to tell Newton what he now knew from the microscopic message which Carlos, then he, had read. He didn’t dare. Newton would find out soon enough.
If there were ever to be an investigation of the coming catastrophe this conversation, ambiguous though it was, could be taken in evidence. He didn’t want to prolong it. Come to that, he could do his bit to make sure there never was an investigation—at least, none in which he would be a suspect. When treason prospers…
This story was going to be written by the victors—no, by the victor!
Beauregard gas-jetted downward, swung his legs to vertical and clicked his feet to the floor. The others gathered around.
Beauregard raised his hands.
He summarised the fight in the workshop, omitting to mention the message that had sent Carlos off on his wild jaunt, and almost certainly on his previous escapade.
said Rizzi.
She was obviously lying, because she’d gone with Carlos to meet the old man in the mountains, but the others didn’t know that and it wasn’t the time to tell them. Not yet.
Don’t get into arguments, he thought. Just give suspicions and mistrust time to rankle. That should do it.
They stood and watched in uneasy silence as the last of the scooter armada passed over, latched on to the launch catapults and were hurled out into the dark.
Locke’s voice returned.
The blackness overcame Beauregard before he had time to reply.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Unpleasant Profession of Nicole Pascal
Predictably, the stood-down squad found themselves back on the bus. Less predictably, they were on their own, with no local passengers, and the time of day was early to mid-morning, as if it were soon after they’d left. It couldn’t be the same day, even if it was roughly the right time of day. They’d been away, in real time, for little over a kilosecond—nearly a fortnight later in the sim.
Beauregard found himself shaking in his seat. Unlike Carlos, he hadn’t been killed in any operation, and his previous returns from action had been smooth. This time, it was much worse than his first arrival. The nightmare now fading too slowly from his mind was of whirling disorientation and a sense of sudden utter helplessness, followed by a succession of hammer blows to the head and a complete draining of all colour and meaning from the world. In that hellish limbo he had seemed to linger for minutes on end. He came out of it feeling as if his soul had been put through a wringer, and then hung out to dry.
The others, he could see, were emerging from similar private torments, rooted in the particular circumstances of their own death or brain-death. Beauregard had no way of knowing whether this was derived from genuine brain-stem memory of their actual deaths, or whether it was an illusion deliberately created and individually attuned. Not that it made any difference to how bad it felt. The fighters sat silent and pale, quivering involuntarily, looking around for reassurance and, in the cases of Chun and Rizzi, reaching for any nearby shoulder to clutch for comfort; Karzan and Zeroual, turning to each other.
Beauregard disdained such dependence. He held himself together and tried to think. He understood that the experience was a by-product of the security check on each mind. But that check was to ensure the mind hadn’t been meddled with. The system couldn’t—in any reasonable time—read memories. His secrets were safe in his head.
Not so for the visual and other inputs to his frame, which he took for granted were recorded as a matter of course. His reading of the microscopic message was certain to be uncovered as soon as any post-mortem—so to speak—examination was carried out. With the squad minus the renegade Carlos safely stashed in the sim, and with the offensive on its plate right now, the company could afford to take its time in picking over the bones of the incident. On the other hand, Locke Provisos might well have specialist units devoted to such inquiries, which wouldn’t divert any physical or information resources from the conflict.
In short, he had no time to lose. He had no time to convert anyone to the Rax, even if he’d wanted to. Which he didn’t, though it would have been convenient if he could have, not for its own sake but to create temporary allies. He didn’t even have time to turn the others against Carlos, which had naturally enough been his first impulse. They all trusted the sarge, but Carlos was the leader. And he didn’t have time to spin an elaborate ruse. In all his time in intel he’d found that by far the best way to turn people—or to trick them into working for you without their knowledge—was to tell them the truth. Or as much of the truth as possible. Chop with the grain, and see the wood split.
He looked around the bus. He was at the back, with a couple of empty seats in front of him. Rizzi was by herself at the front, saying something to Chun, who had just taken his hand off her shoulder. Karzan and Zeroual were behind Chun and huddled together on the seat they shared.
“Everyone OK?” Beauregard asked.
They all turned.
“More or less, sarge,” said Rizzi, still looking wan. The others nodded.
“Good,” said Beauregard. “I’m still feeling a bit shaken myself.” He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I owe you all an apology, especially you, Rizzi. I couldn’t say any of this in the hangar, not with Locke able to overhear our every word. I’m not sure I should even say it here, but if they spy on us here they can spy on us anywhere. Are you all up for that risk?”
“Yes, sarge!”
A gratifying chorus. He felt almost humbled.
“OK,” Beauregard said. “I’m sorry I had to pretend to challenge Rizzi out there, question her loyalties even. I’m sorry, too, that I misrepresented Carlos. What I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say, and which Locke will soon find out, is that I know exactly why Carlos went off on his own. This time, and that time above SH-17. He hasn’t been corrupted, quite the reverse in fact.”
He could see from their faces that this thought came as a relief.
“So what did happen back there, sergeant?” Zeroual asked, his upper body twisted around, one arm crooked over the back of the seat and the other curled about Karzan’s shoulders.
“There was a message in the repair workshop,” Beauregard said. “It had been written in tiny script, by one of the machines there. It may have been hacked by Arcane, or by the freebots directly—I don’t know. Carlos read it, and I read it just after he did. He must have read it just before our last mission, too. And having read it myself, I understand why he fought his way past me and hijacked a scooter, and in fact why he broke ranks and fled toward the surface last time out. He couldn’t share the information, he couldn’t even risk discussing it.”
They were all agog. Beauregard knew that he was doing so well, and sounding so sincere, because he was telling the truth. The longer he could keep this up, the more truthful information he could convey, the easier and more credible it would be to slip in the lie later on: the disinformation, the doubt. The one lethal drop in the drink.
“So what did it say, sarge?” Chun asked.
“It said that Locke Provisos is working for the Rax.”
“How?” said Rizzi, perplexed and challenging.
“By using tactics that mean more and more veterans are revived and thrown into action. The more veterans revived, the greater the chances of some of these being Rax sleeper agents who were never identified. And when there are enough Rax cadre out there, Locke will coordinate them in a surprise attack on the rest of the fighters and re-activate any other systems and sub-systems already suborned by the Rax.”
“But, sarge!” cried Karzan. “If Locke is Rax, then—oh!”
She got it, all right.
“Yes,” said Beauregard. “We’ve been fighting all this time on the wrong side.”
Their colour had been coming back after the trauma of the post-death. Now they’d all paled again. Not Zeroual, not visibly, but his widened eyes did the same job.
“I can see you’re all shocked,” Beauregard said. “So am I. I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when I read it, and had to go out and act normal in fr
ont of you and Locke. But I’m still sorry I had to be so brusque with you, Taransay.”
Rizzi blinked hard. “No problem, sarge. I understand.”
“But, sarge,” Karzan said again, this time more reflectively, “how could you or Carlos tell if the message was true? You remember the lady warned us the robots and AIs know how to push our buttons. Isn’t telling us our company is corrupted just the kind of disinformation they—or Arcane by itself—might use against us?”
“Good point,” said Beauregard. “And you’re right, we were warned the robots can be manipulative little blinkers. And Arcane itself is an AI when all’s said and done. The message said the Arcane fighters who did us over down on SH-17 had found all this out from the robots they captured, who in turn got it from robots around G-0, the ones left over from last time. And it claimed to have evidence—I don’t recall all the details, but I read it in my frame. Now, of course, any link in that chain could be a disinfo insert point, no doubt about it. So we can’t rule that out. But what convinced me, and must have convinced Carlos, wasn’t anything in that message. It was something I thought myself.”
He looked them in straight in the face, one by one.
“What convinced me is that no other explanation makes sense of everything that’s happened. Why should Arcane’s fighters, then the entire Arcane Disputes agency, side with the robots and start fighting us? Why indeed, unless they’ve seen very good evidence themselves. Why is every message they send to us firewalled out? Because they’ve been frantically trying to tell us what they know, and what Locke doesn’t want us to know! Why are we losing every battle with the robots and with Arcane, if Locke Provisos really wants to win? Because all it really wants is to get more and more fighters out of storage and into combat.”
That was making sense to all of them, Beauregard noted with satisfaction.
“Jeez,” said Rizzi. “We have to phone the lady and warn her.”
She reached into her back pocket. Beauregard raised a warning hand.