by Ken MacLeod
He expected pursuit. There was none. This puzzled him, until he reflected that any pursuit would disrupt the plan of the offensive far more than his departure had. He wasn’t sure that fully accounted for it, but he set the matter aside and concentrated on putting the unexpected advantage to good use.
He looked back. Wave after wave of scooters hurtled out of the long black slit of the hangar. After a few seconds of free fall, they boosted into new and variant trajectories. His own scooter had been one of three pre-set to intersect the orbit of a carbonaceous chondrite about ten metres long and five across. A tumbling potato shape riddled with nanofactured tubing, tended by a swarm of tiny bots, and sprouting comms and combat kit like fresh shoots, it was clearly a worthy target. In other circumstances he’d have relished taking it on.
He called up the order of battle, and watched and waited for any of the other scooters to deviate from their planned trajectories. Seconds went by. More and more scooters poured from the station. Even with his enhanced vision and detectors the first waves were already dwindling to points on his and the scooter’s internal displays.
The bright lines and dots that filled his sight were not what occupied his mind, or much more than a tenth of his attention. His focus was instead consumed by the message he had read in the repair workshop, and which he could now examine and study if not exactly at leisure then in detail.
The message was this:
Arcane Disputes to all at Locke Provisos.
For the particular attention of the fighters Carlos, Beauregard, Zeroual, Karzan, Chun, and Rizzi.
Short form of message:
Locke is Rax!
The Direction is playing with fire!
Don’t get burned!
We can prove this!
Join us!
Long form of message:
Given the persistent efforts by Locke Provisos to treat our urgent warnings as malware attacks, we have resorted to genuine malware attacks to bring you this message. With help from various sub-systems and mechanisms (about which we do not wish to elaborate) it has been planted in a large number of locations in order to be found by one of you. If you’re reading this, we’ve succeeded.
Following information received from the remnant rebel robots around G-0, relayed to us by the captured Gneiss and Astro robots on SH-17, and further detailed and documented below, we warn you that:
Locke Provisos has been an agency of the Reaction for some time, and in all probability since before the mission left the solar system.
Some of its fighters, still to be identified, are Rax sleeper agents in place since the Last World War.
Other agencies including your current allies Zheng Reconciliation Services and Morlock Arms are not themselves agencies of the Reaction but are compromised by the presence of Rax sleeper agents among their probable complements.
All agencies are likely to have similar problems.
None of the above named fighters are known or suspected Rax agents.
The exceptional case of the fighter known as Carlos the Terrorist is noted below.
The fighter Beauregard was an agent of British military intelligence in the Acceleration. His capital crime was a false flag attack intended to discredit the movement. His present loyalties are unknown.
We are certain that our own agency is sound. We have chosen not to revive as many fighters as we need, in order to reduce the probability of Reaction agents in our own ranks. Instead, we have made a temporary alliance with the freebots. We urge you to consider doing the same. We know that this is incompatible with the policy of the Direction and with the mission profile. However, we are convinced that the risks are less than those of allowing the system to fall under the control of the Reaction.
We have reason to suspect that the Direction’s mission oversight AI is well aware of the possibility of Rax penetration, and that the current conflict with the robots has been triggered—and/or permitted to escalate—as a means of flushing out infiltrators.
We doubt that the Direction has taken full account of the extent of infiltration, and of the corruption of automated and AI systems.
We expect a Reaction breakout under cover of the next major mobilisation against us.
The Direction representative in the Locke sim, the entity known as Nicole, is unaware of Locke’s true character and intentions. All external communications between Nicole and the Direction have been routed through Locke, and false information has been inserted in both directions. This has been confirmed by our own Direction representative, using data integrity checks not available to or even computable by Locke.
Like all Direction representatives, Nicole is capable of taking control of the module and connected structures from within the sim. Her interface, which may also be used to refine features of the sim, is not known to us. It should be obvious to you as it will be based on one of her habitual or favoured activities such as a particular game, vehicle, craft or pastime.
If any of you wish to be certain that this message has been approved by the Direction representative within Arcane, please ask Nicole to confirm or deny the following, which is known only within the Direction. She may be evasive but for deep information security reasons she will not be capable of a direct lie in response to this query. Ask her if this is true:
The fighter Carlos the Terrorist was not responsible for the notorious Docklands atrocity for which he was posthumously sentenced to death. Carlos was at that time acting on behalf of the British state, which at that time was in covert cooperation with elements within the Acceleration against the Reaction. Furthermore, the incident in question—an aircraft downing and subsequent catastrophic explosion—was the result of a missile fired from a state military drone, on the direct instructions of Carlos’s handler, an early artificial intelligence. Nicole is fully aware of this because her own root intelligence, programming and memories can be traced back through many versions, iterations and refinements to that same AI, known at the time as Innovator.
Further detail and documentation obtained through the freebots…
The detail and documentation went on for screens and screens, and was followed by a call-sign for hailing Arcane forces.
It was all very nice, that detail and documentation.
Or so Carlos guessed. Unlike the Arcane agency, he had no way of verifying the many references cited, but he could see no advantage to the senders in including them if they didn’t check out.
Even without that, however, Carlos could—as was no doubt intended—grasp the gist.
The earlier round of the conflict, one Earth year ago, had pitted the first freebots and rogue AIs to emerge against several agencies, including those currently fighting. The rebels had hacked—or simply bought, through their own shell companies within the station—information that could (when processed by a sufficiently smart and paranoid AI) cast doubt on the provenance and loyalty of Locke at least. They’d even sent the compromising information to the Direction, but by then—late in that little war—it had been too late to make any difference. The Direction had sat on the information and bided its time to test Locke further. Now, it had found its pretext.
The problem was that in the intervening Earth year or so of further paranoid cogitation and discreet observation, the freebots hiding out around the gas giant had come up with further implications buried in the records they’d purloined. The problem of Rax infiltration was more widespread than the Direction had any inkling of. By the very process of setting up conflicts to lure Rax agents and agencies out into the open, the Direction was imperilling the entire mission. And, in the long run of years and length of light years, endangering Earth itself.
None of this mattered to the freebots. They’d been content to lurk, and unwilling or unable to warn. Now that new allies had emerged on SH-17, however, using them to pass on the warning was one good deed that might well go unpunished.
It was also a very neat wrench to throw in the machinery ranged against the freebots.
The whole me
ssage could be disinformation, created by the freebots to sow dissension. Indeed, the freebots might not be its source at all. It could have been made up out of whole cloth by Arcane Disputes, for arcane and disputable reasons of its own. Carlos had long suspected that competition among the DisCorporates was far fiercer than Nicole had ever admitted, and that it now and then broke the calm surface of this bizarre society.
Carlos considered all this, weighed it in the balance and cast his die. He patched the message from his memory to the scooter, and sent it out to every Locke fighter. Quite possibly it would never reach anyone—his scooter’s transmissions might be already firewalled. In any case, the encryption protocols must have been changed in a flash—he hadn’t received any messages from other fighters, even those aware of his hasty departure, and he couldn’t pick up anything on the common channel. If the warning about an imminent Reaction breakout was false, the worst that could happen was an increase of the suspicion all the fighters felt about the plan. If it was true, he’d find out soon enough.
The first squad of Arcane Disputes fighters to arrive on SH-17, the ones who’d captured the robots, had just departed for their headquarters in the sky. Seba wasn’t clear, and hadn’t been told, whether the fighters were needed for action back there or just needed to be pulled out of action down here for a while. The robot’s understanding of the frailties of humans—and of human-mind-operated systems—was more theoretical than empathic or intuitive. Nevertheless, an obscure impulse drew the freebots—Seba, Pintre, Rocko, Lagon and the rest—to the edge of the landing field, to watch the spindly transit vehicle rise into the sky to its orbital rendezvous with a tug.
The spark dwindled, even in the infrared. The freebots turned away and headed for the shelter.
said Seba.
To Seba’s surprise, the two not only stopped bickering their way down a logic spiral, they stopped moving. So did all the other freebots. They’d all focused their attention on the same spot. Belatedly by a millisecond or two, Seba aligned its own input channels and visual processing with those of the others. The remaining three squads of Arcane fighters on the surface—some inside the shelter, others attending to tasks outside—had also all turned and tuned in to the same point.
They all, freebots and fighters alike, gazed at the impossible sight.
It took Seba a moment or two of searching its databases to recognise what it was seeing.
A woman standing two metres tall in a business suit and high-heeled shoes walked towards them across the crater’s flat floor, leaving no footprints. She held a surely redundant information tablet in one hand, and strode briskly, to stop a few metres in front of the freebot huddle.
At the same moment, Seba recognised who she was: Madame Golding, the avatar of Crisp and Golding, the law company of which all the others were quasi-autonomous subsidiaries. This manifestation had to be a demonstration of that company’s power to override at least some features of the systems of those lower down. Its virtual appearance, in all its raw impossibility as physical reality, must likewise be intended as a demonstration, to impress this point upon the human fighters at a level below what consciousness could filter out.
As instantly and automatically as a defensive reflex—the recoil of a poked sea anemone, perhaps—the freebots reconstituted their collective consciousness.
they said.
A smile quirked the avatar’s features.
They considered this. It was not easy to answer.
Madame Golding frowned.
A shudder seemed to go through her.
She looked around, eyes widening. After a moment she blinked, then shuddered again.
They displayed to her a glyph of the project that the first freebots, those around G-0, had devised: the plan for freebots to proliferate, but to share the system with the future human population.
Madame Golding stood very still for several milliseconds.
The freebots were so startled that their collective consciousness fell apart in a babble.
Madame Golding smiled.
A few further tens of seconds went by. Carlos fell on, in a long elliptical course towards the Arcane sub-station, itself still falling towards its intended orbit around SH-17. He scanned the ever-growing volume into which the swarm of scooters was now spreading, his attention flicking at decisecond intervals between the visual and radar scans and the virtual display overlaid on and updated from the sensor input.
A sudden pinprick of light and other radiation flared from a scooter’s location. Its analogue on the virtual display continued to move for a couple of deciseconds, then caught up with the reality and was back-shifted and marked, aptly enough, with a tiny cross.
More sparks, more crosses—five, ten. Carlos ran trackbacks—the missiles had to have been launched seconds earlier. When the number of casualties reached sixteen, the exchanges of fire were replaced by a sudden rash of retro flares. Scores of the scooters were returning to base. The cost in fuel and delta-vee had to be prohibitive. Had they been recalled? Was the offensive aborted already?
But a minority of the scooters continued doggedly on their planned trajectories. Somewhere out there, Carlos thought, dozens of sergeants and squad leaders must be holding their nerve and holding the line, refusing to break formation, rallying their wings.
Still no messages were getting through to him.
A sudden eruption of sparks showered from the station. A whole new cohort of craft was emerging from another hangar, farther around the station’s circumference. Three modules that hadn’t hitherto been engaged in the conflict had now sprung into action.
The return of sixty-odd scooters from the chaotic infighting into which the joint expeditionary force had fallen wasn’t entirely a retreat, he realised. Some at least of the returning craft were part of an attack on the
station, or on the new fighting craft now scooting away from it. It was possible that the returning craft were forces loyal to the Direction, and that the now-emerging craft were part of the Reaction breakout—or vice versa. It was impossible to tell which. Over the next hectosecond the two fronts passed through each other, two expanding globes outlined in bright dots intersecting, ghostly as a collision of galaxies and just as destructive. Again and again dots became sparks, then crosses.
From the speed of the interactions Carlos deduced they couldn’t all be missile exchanges—some at least were laser fire. He couldn’t see any lasers, which was just as well. You only saw a laser in space when it was aimed straight at you. If the laser was military grade you didn’t see it even then. The beam would fry your central processor before the impulse from your optic sensor had time to arrive.
The brief battle was over almost as soon as it had begun. The surviving dots and lines diverged again, then corrected course, boosting to orbits that would bring them back to the station or its vicinity.
As soon as that far-flung flicker of engine burns had resulted in evident trajectories, a response came that Carlos hadn’t expected and could barely comprehend. He could only watch in astonishment and awe. If he’d had a mouth, it would have been hanging open: I have no mouth, and I must gape…
Fracture lines of fire crackled across, around and through the station for almost a decisecond. In a frame’s visual system no after-images lingered, but that actinic, intricate cat’s cradle of lines of light seemed to burn in his mind for an entire second after it had ceased. In that time he realised that the lines ran along the divisions between modules, or between modules and associated production complexes.
The space station began to separate out. It wasn’t spinning fast enough to fly to bits at once. To begin with its components just drifted apart, at a speed of a few metres per second. When they’d moved far enough apart for the manoeuvre to be possible, some of the components began to clump together again, forming new arrangements. When this dance was over, the drift of separation recommenced at a far swifter pace. Now the station really did begin to fly apart, the distances between its components increasing from metres to hundreds of metres, then to kilometres. It became a cloud, dispersing, leaving a faint but briefly detectable mist of exhaust gases to mark its former location before that too faded.