‘Penhaligon’s failing, alright,’ she said, more to herself than to the Inquisitor. ’I want a guarantee from your people. Transmissions and safe passage out of here.’
‘We can do broadcasts,’ said Mahasen. ‘We can do safe passage. Can you do your part?’
Unsaid. Can you kill Penhaligon? He did not dare say it outright, she saw. And yes, she could. And then, she would flee with Bengali and whatever data Drake wanted, and call down the invasion. Goa would rumble in. The tiger colonel and his war machines. A cleansing fire that would, as Drake said, get rid of them all – the terrorists as well as the complacent and greedy Houses that worked more for Penhaligon than for the Empire, and dared to broker deals with China; the rot at the heart of this colony. Parliament would vote on Drake’s push into Chinese waters. Many would die.
‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ Drake had said to her. ‘You know how it is, Sixsmith.’
And she did.
‘One more thing,’ she said, rearranging her face muscles into the closest approximation of trust. ‘You knew Conrad?’
The Inquisitor’s face shifted to one of unease. ‘Yes?’
‘What happened? Don’t give me the official version. Tell me the truth.’
‘Penhaligon found out about him,’ he said. ‘Penhaligon sent Eliott Grimme.’
‘Eliott Grimme was decommissioned’, she said, ‘way before our time.’
‘Yes, but not the way you think,’ he said. ‘He was retired, not decommissioned. He and Penhaligon were friends … I think. I think. He had a house near Kandy. Used to visit Colombo to keep an eye on the roboticist.’ he paused. ‘He went after Conrad. Bound him, gagged him, dragged him into Colombo.’
He handed her an envelope. In it was a small memory chip. She palmed it. Surprisingly, there were no viruses, but there was a video.
A city. A ruined city. And a man dressed in black. He was dragging another, gagged and bound, down a street, bumping him on the ground dead weight. She saw a leg, twisted at an unnatural angle, and then hands, very carefully broken, the bones poking out on each end.
The man in black removed the gag and dropped his burden in the middle of the street, right in the centre of the camera’s frame. The bound creature tumbled and groaned. And she saw its face.
Conrad.
The man in black, looked this way and that, and then began climbing, out of sight, only to reemerge almost right in front of the camera. He was clearly wounded, heavily, for all that he moved and climbed. One leg was held straight by metal strips crudely welded to it.
She could see more of Conrad’s work on him as he got closer. One of the eyes were missing, the other half of the face torn all the way down to the metal. What was left was memorable but not handsome – square, lined, eyes too far apart, heavily scarred.
She recognized him instantly. Every SOE operative knew Eliott Grimme. Every cub trainee was shown the footage; Hong Kong, Ireland, and then, most recently, Ceylon. Death himself, outdated but still deadly.
Grimme turned back to the bound man.
‘Oi,’ he said. ‘What are you, fifth gen?’
‘Six,’ said Conrad’s voice, clear as bell, but hoarse. That was Conrad in extreme pain.
‘You’re not going to survive, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘I got your batteries. They’re leaking out into your blood right now. Horrible way to die.’
‘I know,’ said Conrad.
Grimme waited. The camera skipped timestamps. Night fell. Then morning. Conrad tried to crawl. She could hear him trying.
And in the morning, a child came up to the bound soldier, carrying a spear. No, not a child. And not one, either. Ten, twenty. They all carried weapons – butcher swords, hooks, poles turned into spears. They closed in on the defenseless Conrad, metal flashing in the dawn.
‘They don’t make them like they used to,’ Eliott Grimme said to the camera.
It didn’t take long. Halfway through, Grimme pulled out a revolver – an ancient one. He smirked at the camera and reloaded, slowly, while in the background, an improvised cleaver amputated a screaming Conrad’s legs. Sixsmith gritted her teeth and forced herself to watch.
Finally, Grimme looked at the camera, dead centre. His one eye looked, even through the camera.
Sixsmith thought he looked extraordinarily tired.
‘Good game, Drake,’ he whispered, and shot himself.
‘That’s it?’ she said as the video ended.
‘That’s it,’ said Mahasen. He shrugged. ‘Shall we?’
Inside, she felt a hollow kind of anger, a need to lash out without having a reason or a target. Drake was right; Conrad had known the risks. And Grimme was dead.
There was something profoundly dissatisfying about the thought.
They entered the Ceylonese airspace on a fine, sunny day, slicing into the harbour of Trincomalee like a bee drawn into a gigantic hive. The archives – written first by dry military intelligence personnel, then spiced up by phenomenally bored English graduates stuck behind various administrative tasks at the War Office – spoke of it as one of the great natural harbours of the world, but whatever nature had given it was now coated with a layer of men and metal. A single Tin Soldier sat in the blue-grey shallows, rocking gently in the calm sea.
Their ship, the Caradoc, danced around it and into the port beyond, which was being rebuilt or renovated: grey concrete spires reached into the sky and dark-skinned men swarmed over the exposed skeletons of buildings being born.
The silence vanished, gone in the roar of the wind and the soft lapping of the sea. And there was the captain of the Caradoc’s airship, who kept trying to make conversation, but had yet to pick up on Sixmith’s profound disinterest.
She was used to it by now.
The hydrofoil sped towards a shore and a market that seemed to have grown on the fortifications like fungus, trading economics for protection, with a loud warren of white buildings and plastic extensions tacked on to them. A sea of brown people were trading and socializing on what would have been landing strips. The only thing that was familiar was the flatness of the city that unfolded beneath them. Old British zoning laws – building cities wide but not tall; rules long since subverted in London. The people milling here could have very well been Indian, except there was more order, slightly less chaos, less colour in their clothes, more white. Where she would have expected a platoon of Hindu temples, all riotous colour and writhing frescoes, stood a single white dome.
The people on the nearest airstrip looked up at a descending dirigible, and with a calculated patience, moved themselves away. When the dirigible moved off, they moved right back to where they were.
Bengali peered over the handrails. He heard the captain berating the men below, shouting at them to fetch tow ropes and clear the bystanders, but his words did little. Eventually, the few Indian soldiers on board were sent over on trailing ropes like monkeys. Women in the crowd, holding metal pots at their hips, told them where to tie the ropes.
Thirty minutes later, with a great creaking, they landed. The hot breeze picked up little bits of dust from the construction around the landing site and threw things at their faces.
‘Man should be right … about … now,’ said the captain, right beside Sixsmith.
A convoy of jungle-cars bounced up greet them – Indian Tatanagar-Vs, all tough balloon tires and smoke, with machine-guns at the back. A dark-skinned man in a scarlet uniform got out and called out to them. The captain answered, and the soldiers rustled up a line of porters that went centipede-like to the hold at the back and crawled back with bales and boxes on their backs. The line milled around and took off up a steep path to another section of the market.
‘Some cargo, while we’re at it,’ said Mahasen.
‘Alright,’ said Sixsmith. The Tatanagars came, went, came back, went again, and then eventually it was her turn. She threw in the grey bulletproof bag she carried her clothes in.
The noisy vehicle took
her to another airship, this one far smaller. There were two Ceylonese soldiers in the cabin, both dressed in the same scarlet; they got off their seats the moment Sixsmith and Mahasen entered. Sixsmith saw them look her up and down, up and down, in quick, resentful flashes.
Well, fuck them.
‘Welcome to Her Majesty’s finest, eh?’ said the captain of the airship cheerily. Sixsmith groaned inside. ‘Now, the engine … aha.’
The engine hammered in a ceaseless churn that sounded like a thousand ratchets falling in a metal tub. It roared and they bounced up, heading out of that gray concrete jungle with a cough of smoke and a rattle. A dull road appeared below them, snaking through the city surrounding the harbour, headed south and west. It cut through dark green jungle and villages’ worth of stack-farms crowned with bright green.
Sixsmith pulled up the maps from his memory and studied them. Three more hours of travel at this speed.
‘Fantastic place, eh madam?’ shouted the captain over the screaming of the engine, tilting his head back to address Bengali. ‘The Crown turning Trinco into a proper fortress! Nippons won’t touch this place for hundreds of years!’
‘What?’
‘Nippons, madam! Been sending scout submarines over! Three in the last six months!’
So Nippon was getting restless. She filed this away. Perhaps it might be useful to their mission, perhaps not, but it never hurt to know more. Shee made himself as comfortable as possible in the bucket seat. The Chinese were building new super carriers off Australia: problematic, but as long as Lizzie’s Peace held, not something to think too much about. The Vatican was running another crusade on the Holy Lands. Jerusalem and the Ottoman King had called for aid.
She thought of the Teutonic Knights – those terrible giants in their heavy siege armor, cutting rivers of blood across the plains and being cooked by high-energy Ottoman lasers – and was glad he was several thousand miles away.
The city slowly gave way to jungle. The sea breeze vanished, leaving only the hot sun behind. They were flying low now; the humidity struck them with a wave of sweat. Trees flashed by in a blur.
‘Going to get really warm south,’ said the captain. ‘Thought India hot? Ceylon hotter! Even food here burns you.’
The two hours passed like two years. From his right came the smell of pot. The Ceylonese gunmen were on the rail, passing a rolled joint back and forth.
‘Wake me up when when we get there,’ she said.
When Mahasen shook her awake, it was dark, and they were circling what looked like a little city. They were halfway between Colombo and Kandy; this place was called Gampaha. As for the rest of her questions, Mahasen evaded them, but she could guess.
They were not the only people in the sky. Grey shapes floated down from the sky and settled near the outskirts. There were men and women in the fields around them, stacking crates of what looked like weapons and armour. They looked skittish. They felt skittish.
She knew that mood.
In the city, lights came on in houses and apartments. Someone had seen, someone had heard, someone knew the army was on the move.
But whose army is it now? thought Sixsmith.
Their own ship continued, giving a wide berth to the grey ghosts that flitted past. They landed at a hangar in the middle of the jungle and disembarked to a staff of silent, staring men with cheap assault rifles and nails bitten to the quick. Within minutes, jungle cars were being unloaded – more crates, she saw. She and Mahasen had squeezed themselves inside. The car hissed out, making a low growling noise.
The jungle closed over them, dulling her senses with a terrible stillness and humidity. The road grew bumpier and the city drew closer, until fences and road signs were replaced by short, rectangular houses in neat rows. The houses grew progressively taller and more ruined as they rumbled in. Signposts lay broken and rusted, and roofs had gaping holes. Here and there, a house lay scorched and blasted, its bits flung out, as if something terrible had exploded inside. The sky grew darker, as if in sympathy. The road turned into patches of tar and mud. They passed a shrine of some kind – a narrow house-like thing with coloured flags hanging from it. A tiny stone Buddha peered out from inside, wearing a robe of moss and old leaves.
The jungle car rolled to a halt outside a cluster of houses, around which the space had been cleared. The rubble looked fresh. Iron spikes had been driven into the ground and strung with electric wire. The engines idled down slowly, and a high, steady hum cut through the silence that ensued.
‘Far as I go,’ said Mahasen Wijeratne, handing her the keys. ‘Can’t leave for too long, might look suspicious. We’re quite close to Colombo here, you should be able to find your fellow easily. Before you go, what’s it like?’
‘Like?’
He gestured at her. At her body. ‘Being special.’
She slowly finished checking her pack, frowning slightly. ‘Think of it this way,’ she said. ‘You get a call every week. You can’t bloody say no, all you can say is, “yes sir, no sir, I’ll pack my bags right away, sir.” And you end up in a shithole getting shot at. I’ve got ten more years before my contract is up. And you know what? This body needs maintenance. Needs money. You want to leave the service, you better be filthy rich before you do, because you sure as hell will fall apart if you can’t pay for maintenance. And the thing they don’t tell you is that by the time those years are gone, you won’t even care anymore. You won’t care about anything in the world. All that’s left is a gun barrel and you on one side of it.’
She hadn’t really meant to rant. It might have been the most she’d said to this oddly designed pup. But it felt like he needed to learn a few things.
He seemed to chew it over. ‘Charge of the Light Brigade shit.’
‘About right.’
‘Good hunting, then.’
‘You too,’ she said.
THREE
Jacob Bengali was studying the bots and having the time of his life.
That is to say, he was knee-deep in undergrowth and pseudojungle, swarmed by leeches every two feet. He was smoking the terribly rolled beedi that the impatient soldiers had made for him. He was practically vibrating between his binoculars, his improved telescope, and various positional antennae, and yes, still having the time of his life.
Hewage had kept his core algorithms secret. That was fine, as far as things went. Bengali was convinced of the man’s genius; let him have that. Hewage had, however, shared with him the blank behavioural model that the algorithms generated – an interlinked network of seventeen complex classifiers that, as far as Bengali could tell, interacted with each other in all sorts of complex ways to produce behaviour, like a mockup of a human brain, except distorted. And that Bengali could study. He could feed it inputs, see how it behaved.
It was as he’d suspected – Hewage had no grasp of fieldwork, no grounding in the physical theory. His was a science half learned at the scrapheap and the other half improvised on the cutting tables of the Inquisition. This job was a perfect fit for a more formally trained scholar who could predict what these things would do.
And here Bengali had his chance. He had started slow. Pattern recognition? Yes, they could do that. One of the seventeen boxes was a base table that marked anything on two legs as an enemy, and then over time grew to classify things as ‘not enemy’, and later, ‘ally’. Could they be predicted with game theory? Yes, it turned out, they could, for small sample sizes. In fact, small enough and they even seemed to default to some sort of Coasian bargaining, using fuel as currency. And what about Bengali’s own, more complex behavioural framework, psychohistory? Here, things were murkier, but having witnessed them from T-zero, as it were, he had enough data for a simple approximation built mostly out of tree-based models stacked together.
He knew what he had to do now – observe the real bot society as it evolved, collect data, use it to run n simulations until, by sheer brute force, he managed a better understanding of all of the variables at play. This was his fort
e. Model the impossible. Take chance out of the equation. No hiding from the math and all that. As is, given just the basic simulations and the qualits, he had enough to publish – enough, perhaps, to apply for Royal Society funding, or perhaps even a teaching position, where he had students to do the scrub work for him.
At any rate, he had had the time to put the findings together. They were just about ready to be sent to Drake and the Royal Society at the same time, co-authored with Hewage and pending his embargo. A nice scoop for them both.
Dots moved on his terminals; little simulated bots on yet another test run. Typing carefully, he set up a simple two-dimensional graph that described the current environs and starting locations of the bots – a new setup each time. To each bot he had attached a copy of Hewage’s base model, largely sandboxed, some functionality stripped out, but still capable.
It took some time to prime each bot – they still thought they had physical bodies, so he had to sit through the BIOS, the booting up, putting out feelers and looking for hardware that only existed as ghost code. Power source. Arms. Legs. The bot waking up, querying its environment for energy. With great patience he shepherded each one, until these simulated bots had some time to train themselves and were arranged roughly similar to where they were in real life right now.
And then he started the fun stuff. First, acceleration – drop in infinite simulated energy, let five years of time pass. Then introduce human fire squads vaguely modelled on the kind of troops he had seen here. On the screen, ten fire squads out front, slowly sweeping in a circle just beyond the towns they had brought online, setting up guard towers and sentries along the main routes leading to Colombo. The initial squads, all recon units backed up by Inquisitors, were now being supplemented by light machine guns and mines.
Ever so often, the dots would stumble across them, scatter and go dark. And immediately, the entire network would react. Out of nowhere; more dots would converge like a swarm. The simulated fireteams would backtrack, shuddering nervously, abandoning their posts.
The Inhuman Peace Page 18